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Saturday, October 13, 2012

The presidential and vice-presidential debates provided us
with two snapshots of two different and yet very similar men.

The Obama who showed up to debate Mitt Romney and the Biden
who showed up to debate Paul Ryan were outwardly different types. One white and
one black, one elderly and one middle-aged, one a veteran of the Senate and the
other a political tyro rushed through the ranks on the promise of his
electability.

But Obama and Biden showed once again at the debates that
they have more in common than anyone would give them credit for. Obama was
surly while Biden was belligerent, but both men behaved the way they did out of
an innate sense of entitlement. With their every word and gesture they made it
clear that they were too good to be here.

While Romney and Ryan have often been accused of elitism,
both as a personal accusation and as a class accusation, they behaved with
dignity and discretion. Obama and Biden on the other hand treated their
opponents with contempt beginning with their lack of preparation for the
debates and their lack of grace in the debate.

Obama believed that he had won the debate after he lost it and
Biden believed that he won the debate before it even began. Biden’s braggadocio
and Obama’s disdain both came out of their own exaggerated senses of self-worth
that made them feel that they were too good for the forum and too good for
their opponents.

Biden and Obama may not have race, religion or age in
common, but they both share a common narcissism that leads them to believe that
their innate specialness transcends competence and that their rhetorical gifts
can overcome their laziness and lack of preparation. Neither man bothered to
hide their belief that their opponents are inferior to them in every possible
way.

Strip away the years and races, the experience and the
capped teeth, and you have two petty egotistical men who believe that they are
destined for greater things than whatever thing they happen to be doing at the
moment, even if what they happen to be doing at the moment is occupying the two
highest offices in the land.

Their thin skins and fake smiles go together, along with
their contempt for each other and the whole world. They are men who live
oblivious to other men, who occupy a current of their own imagining, who are
always certain that life has not rewarded them sufficiently for all that they
have done, even though they have done nothing. They are men of ambition, but
not talent. Their only gift is one of imagining themselves in greater and
greater positions and the accompanying talent of convincing others that their
imaginary abilities should be rewarded with real positions.

They are glib, but not smart men. They have a facility for
speaking off-the-cuff, but that facility betrays them as often as it rewards
them. Like actors they love the sounds of their own voices so much that they
never notice when their own song becomes a siren call dooming them to the crash
of their own stupidity.

They can tell stories, but they are always the stars of
their own stories, the “I’s” of the legends that they build around themselves,
the gods who stride from their own temples, the heroes who come to their own
rescue and then marry themselves and cheer themselves on.

Both men have come out of political machines where rhetoric
was more important than competence. Political machines disguise their mechanisms
of corruption with high-flow rhetoric and tribal appeals that convince their
audiences that while may be thieves, they are ‘their’ thieves who steal on
behalf of their race, their community and their group.

Biden and Obama both excel at the rhetoric of grievance.
They summon up displays of fake anger to disguise their own corruption and
incompetence, striving to convince slices of the electorate that they are
fighting for them, because they know that they have no hope of convincing them
that they are competent managers.

Obama is the new face of the Democratic Party, the perfect
public face of its coalition between the government upper class and their
minority voters, while Biden is the face of the old Democratic Party, the one
that played on the working class Irish, Italian and Jewish vote in urban
centers on behalf of the social planners of the New Deal and the New Frontier.

The Democratic Party is losing its grip on the Reagan
Democrats, the loss of manufacturing jobs and the growing conservatism of small
business is leaving less and less room for the kind of barstool campaigns that
Joseph Robinette Biden was once good for.

The 2012 election is the last hurrah of the Biden class,
those grinning senseless storytellers and glib millionaires with hard-luck
tales and rolled up sleeves pretending to be working class, shaking hands with
union steelworkers, mill workers, factory workers, telling them, “Oh boy that’s
tough, but lemme tell you about the time my wife almost caught me with Cindy. Don’t
worry the Democrats have your back. Stick with us and we’ll take care of you.”

Those voters are vanishing, falling through the cracks of
EPA fascism and globalized outsourcing. If Obama wins another term, there may
still be room for a few thousand of them to put together solar panels and
windmills from China, but even those jobs will go to the new face of America.
To Somali refugees and Mexican immigrants, and those workers will not need
Biden to stand outside their bar and shake their hands. Some of them won’t have
bars and most of them won’t care about anything but the benefits package they
get through their local cultural center.

That’s the new face of America that Obama represents. It’s
the same old story of the urban political machine which caters to the revolving
door of new immigrants, stocking up front men who speak their language and know
all their customs, only to give those front men the boot when the demographics
of the alleys of Slumville and Immigrant’s Row change.

Tammany Hall’s leadership went from English to Irish to
Italian, Jewish and Black in some 170 years. The process has since accelerated
and Joe Biden with his fake working class mannerisms and outdated jokes doing
his best to be everyone’s fun crazy uncle is almost done.

Biden’s currency, like Obama’s currency, was his identity.
Not a real identity, but an artificial identity. Crazy Uncle Joe is as
authentically working class as Barry Hussein is an African-American. Neither of
them was chosen for anything but their ability to mimic the identities of
others in order to project a lower class sensibility that they have no part of.

Debating Ryan was Biden’s last hurrah, it was the thunder of
a dinosaur crashing through the trees, snapping his teeth and roaring at the
sky, without understanding that the big fire above is a meteor coming down on
top of him. The world in which Biden might have aimed at the top job is long
gone. Biden’s function today is to snap his teeth, to roar and remind the youngsters
that old time political crooks didn’t need to call themselves community
organizers or bolster their credentials with fake teaching gigs. All they
needed was a barstool and a great deal of nerve.

Biden has ushered in that new world, and yet he has no
apprehension of it. Joseph Robinette Biden imagines that the future still
belongs to him and that he can keep hold of it so long as the hair plugs keep
hold of his skull. And while he may be an object of fun back at the White
House, his boss should carefully consider his fate as an object lesson.

The only thing really separating Obama from Biden is a
generational shift and the shift is driven by the political agenda of the left.
It is not too difficult, although quite horrifying, to imagine an America in
the year 2037 where Barack Hussein is as much of an anachronism as Crazy Joe.
The Democratic Party has reinvented itself numerous times and the stresses that
it imposes on the country come out of the left’s program.

The smirking fake working class pol was not the endpoint of
the Democratic Party, though in his own time the creature seemed every bit as
radical as a man with Muslim roots in the White House. There is no reason to
think that Barack with his Third Culture image and his fake veneer of culture
is going to be the endpoint either. If the left has taught us anything, it is
that its narrative of cultural destruction is always able to conceive of more
and more horrifying worlds than anything we might behold today.

Obama has already gotten his, and so has Biden, though the
corrupt Senator still fantasizes about a White House he cannot have. The
difference between political ambition and political success is often timing and
luck. As a child, Obama used to tell his classmates that he was an Indonesian
prince. That position wasn’t open to him, but he lucked into a political career
that coincided with a wave of Muslim terrorism and an accompanying wave of
appeasement by his party.

Had that not happened, it’s quite possible that Obama’s
exotic bio would have meant nothing and he would be sitting in the Illinois
Senate watching Cory Booker making his acceptance speech in the race to unseat
President McCain. And conversely, had the Democratic Party not swung so far to
the left and stayed focused on the American working class instead of an artificially
imported diversity overseen by a college educated upper class. Had it embraced tariffs
and protected American manufacturing, then the country might be a very
different place and President Joe Biden might be inveighing against Republican
elitism while boasting of showing Chinese products the door.

But these worlds are not places that narcissists like Obama
or Biden, who believe in their own specialness, rather than the random chance
of world events and the influence of ideological movements, can visit or
appreciate.

Obama and Biden see themselves as men of destiny, when they’re
actually front men for a massive scam that has been going on long before their
grandparents got out of diapers. The scam has evolved and become more
sophisticated, and that growing sophistication is why Biden is only useful to
the scam as a scarecrow shouting at Ryan about anything and everything, while
Obama is useful as the healer who will reassure the country of its new moral
stature.

But though they play different roles, that does not make them different men. It is the accidents and plans of the machine that made them fit only for these different roles, that left Biden no choice but to play the loud buffoon, while Barack got the star part of the new JFK.

Barry and Joe are the same man because the machine they
serve is the same machine and though they imagine that they rule the machine,
it is the machine that chose them, it is the machine that uses them and it is
the machine that will throw them away when it is done.

Is this piece a joke? I've never read any off your others - this link was just sent to me by someone wondering how to answer a misguided friend who found this accusatory, disrespectful, partisan, hypocritical drivel to be brilliant. You don't care about America. You care about your side winning and have convinced yourself that that equals patriotism. As a result, you demonize the "other side" and paint their every word and action as demonic. It's ridiculous and if it doesn't stop, neither "side" will succeed. They'll simply spend all their time trying, in vain, to work with people who are out for their demise, only to be accused of bot being bipartisan enough by those sa e partisans who'd sooner defeat an opponent than steward any form of actual, just, thoughtful, human, humane progress.

Read your post, and am just wondering what teacher's union, and/or other union, "tikkun olam"just for gentiles obssessed Reform Jewish Synagogue, special interest, or part of the non-taxpaying 47% of the American public that you belong to! Broad generalities and dysfunctional punditries that make sure that you get yours is certainly part of the democratic scheme, but how does it work for the country? Obama out, democracy and job growth in!

"Obama is the new face of the Democratic Party, the perfect public face of its coalition between the government upper class and their minority voters, while Biden is the face of the old Democratic Party, the one that played on the working class Irish, Italian and Jewish vote in urban centers on behalf of the social planners of the New Deal and the New Frontier."

I am not exactly rah rah for Romney, either. He comes across as a rich snob and Ryan as a poor little rich boy. But, unlike Obama/Biden I feel they will do a much better job when it comes to national defense and the economy right now.

Totally OT but I watch a brief clip of Obama's debate with Romney. Why is Obama focusing so much public attention on his love of Michelle? He did it at the convention (sorry, I went very low brow that night and watched Honey Boo Boo child like a lot of people).

Obama did the same Michelle love fest on The View. He couldn't capture the whole Camelot thing in his first four years.

Really OT: Love them or hate them, Alana Thompson and her family drew Americans in to watch. Again, it's a very low brow show but the family says they don't care if people like them or don't like them. They just love their little lives and are enjoying living them.

As one reviewer said of the show, wouldn't it be great if more families were so unapologetically themselves?